Immigrants who cross into the United States illegally would be hard pressed to find common cause with Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand.

Under his tenure, Jefferson Parish has led Louisiana in aiding deportations. He is also an unabashed supporter of President Donald Trump's promise to build a border wall.

"The Trump policy on immigration is the first one in a long time that has made any sense to me," Normand said, describing the deportation of immigrants across a porous border as a losing enterprise. "We were wasting a lot of time trying to do things internally."

But where undocumented immigrants fear capture, and their advocates fear assaults against their civil rights, Normand represents another node on a spectrum of growing concerns over shifting American immigration policies. Trump's crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities has local law enforcement agencies, already strained by limited resources, facing a slew of challenges to navigate federal immigration law and stay within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution.

The rancor around sanctuary cities is especially acute in Louisiana. State Attorney General Jeff Landry continues to accuse New Orleans of enacting sanctuary city policies. Mayor Mitch Landrieu rejects that distinction, highlighting that his administration cleared the city's policing policies with the feds last year. But movement among conservatives in the state Legislature to punish New Orleans could catch other parishes and sheriffs in the crossfire -- Normand and Jefferson Parish among them.

Before Trump, the term "sanctuary city" was little more than a nickname. It didn't appear in official policy memos or executive orders. It was a phrase first applied to places in the 1980s where advocates sheltered Central American immigrants escaping civil unrest at home but denied asylum in the U.S.

It has evolved in the present political clime to be a catch-all for jurisdictions that restrict cooperation with federal immigration officials. It is the newest frontier in federal immigration policy shifts that stretch back to President George W. Bush's administration.

Toward the end of his second term, Bush enacted the Secure Communities program to coordinate local, state and federal agencies to deport immigrants in the country illegally. Between November 2009 and February 2015, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office sent 195,596 names of arrested individuals to federal law enforcement officials, according to federal statistics. That average was more than 3,100 a month.

Among that number, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, identified 6,960 described "illegal aliens," 1,104 of whom were eventually deported.

Everyone booked into Jefferson Parish jail to this day has his or her name sent to the feds.

"That way I can't ever be accused of profiling," Normand said. "Everybody's name goes to immigration. Every single one."

Jefferson Parish led Louisiana in deportations under the Secure Communities program. New Orleans, with a smaller population by comparison, sent federal officials 82,475 names between May 2010 and February 2015, leading to 1,492 illegal aliens identified and 292 deported.

Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman did not respond to multiple requests for interviews.

The Secure Communities program came under fire during President Barack Obama. Concern mounted that it undermined trust of police in minority and immigrant communities. The Obama administration phased out the program in 2015, replacing it with the Priority Enforcement Program that July.

The PEP established, essentially, a triage system for dealing with illegal immigration. Top priority for deportation was given to those caught immediately at the border, convicted felons, gang members and potential terrorists. The program shifted focus from deporting anyone found to be in the country illegally to a strong focus on criminal offenders.

Trump promised a crackdown on undocumented immigrants during the campaign. Once in office, he issued an executive order that threatens to withhold, or even claw back, federal money from cities and counties that don't honor that push.

Effects of the policy shift already are being felt. ICE is under instruction to increase requests that local law enforcement agencies detain immigrants they have identified for 48 hours so they can be picked up by immigration officers.

Jefferson Parish released 54 detainees to ICE in 2015, JPSO records show. That rose to 110 in 2016, much of that after Trump's election victory on Nov. 8, Normand said.

JPSO has already sent 48 detainees to ICE in the first two months of 2017, putting it on pace to easily eclipse the average number of handovers during the past decade.

Gusman has declined to honor ICE detainer requests since 2013, a policy that the Justice Department and representatives of inmates who sued the jail over its unconstitutional conditions agreed to before a federal judge. Gusman has argued that his decision does not violate federal law -- though the Trump administration, particularly Attorney General Jeff Sessions, cites such policies as glaring evidence of a sanctuary city.

"I really can't reconcile what someone's definition of a sanctuary city is versus our compliance with a law," Gusman said when asked about Sessions' stance during a community meeting Thursday (March 30).

On the community policing front, some jurisdictions are seeing renewed signs of chilled relationships between law enforcement and immigrant groups. The Los Angeles Times reported earlier this month that police have seen a dramatic drop in crimes reported by that city's Latino residents because of worry over Trump's anti-sanctuary city policies.

The Department of Homeland Security in March released its first "declined detainer" report, a list of jurisdictions that did not hold people deemed illegal aliens that ICE wished to take into custody. New Orleans appeared on that list. Jefferson Parish did not.

"My name very well could end up on that report," Normand said. His dilemma is that a detainer can be declined for myriad reasons. The most common: that the person is no longer in custody. Jefferson Parish jails have a long history of overcrowding, and suspects held for minor offenses are often released with a summons that they show up in court.

Normand said his deputies rarely jail suspects for nonviolent misdemeanors. Improperly crossing the border, for example, is a federal criminal misdemeanor. Being present in the country unlawfully, however, is a civil law case. Both are offenses that can lead to deportations, but civil violations -- such as visa overstays -- often can be remedied administratively.

Normand honors criminal and civil detainer requests from ICE, but he said budget and jail space restraints limit how long he can keep inmates, as well as influencing his decision to keep them at all.

"It's a (civil immigration) status offense whereby we hold them for 48 hours. We know that they don't have a violent criminal conviction. They're not a documented gang member. We know they're not a documented terrorist," he said. "We're going to go through a lot of machinations and a lot of money spent with a high likelihood these guys are walking out the door."

Normand says it costs his office $69 a day to house the average suspect. The going reimbursement rate for holding federal detainees is $54. That's a main reason JPSO has never housed federal inmates, unlike other parish jails, Normand said.

He also expressed his concern that his deputies don't have the same liability protections as federal agents, possibly leaving him and his office vulnerable to lawsuits.

Limits on budgets and personnel hit both sides of the equation. ICE must also prioritize which cases it has the time and manpower to target. There are roughly 90 immigration officers and homeland security investigators operating in Louisiana.

"Everything we do is resource-driven, so the number of persons we arrest and detain and remove is specifically tied to resource allocation," ICE spokesman Tom Byrd said. "That's bed space, that's personnel."

"These are all excuses because somebody has an agenda because they believe they want an open door policy," Landry said in an interview this week. "All this is is to further what the left is advocating, which is open borders. That's all."

While Landrieu and Gusman are Democrats, Normand and Landry are Republicans.

Landry is Louisiana's most vocal critic of sanctuary city policies, and New Orleans remains his favorite punching bag.

"I have great appreciation for Sheriff Normand," Landry said. "There's nothing to indicate to me that Jefferson Parish is a sanctuary parish. The only parish I know that has a specific sanctuary policy as written is Orleans."

Landry said he defines sanctuary cities two ways: local governments that don't tell federal officials that they have evidence of undocumented immigrants, and governments that don't ask individuals whether they are in the country illegally. He puts New Orleans in the latter.

"I find it quite fascinating for people out there to say sanctuary cities are not defined. That's ridiculous," Landry said. "A sanctuary is a safe harbor. It's a city that engages in a safe harbor for people who come into the country illegally."

Landrieu in February 2016 directed the New Orleans police officers not to ask the immigration status of witnesses or victims of a crime. Landry said that broke a federal law that prohibits any bans on local law enforcement from communicating with federal immigration officers.

So Landrieu, coordinating with the Justice Department and the court-approved monitor of a federal reform measure to bring the NOPD up to constitutional standards, added a line that expressly stated there was no ban on officers talking to ICE. Senior ICE officials were consulted throughout the process and offered no objections. A federal judge approved the change and it was codified into that measure, known as a consent decree. Officials with Landrieu's office and the Justice Department's civil rights division testified about it to Congress in September.

Landry, Louisiana's 3rd District congressman at the time, praised the change. "Because of the efforts we made in Louisiana, our state no longer has any jurisdictions prohibiting them from communicating with federal immigration authorities," he said in congressional testimony. "Today, Louisiana is safer because of these changes."

Nonetheless, he has continued to insist New Orleans is a sanctuary city.

Rep. Valarie Hodges, R-Denham Springs, working with Jacques Ambers, an attorney in Landry's office, crafted a bill that targets New Orleans' immigration status policy. It seeks to give street-level deputies authority to decide whether to ask people about their immigration status. It also seeks to penalize jurisdictions that don't by threatening fines and withholding state funds.

The bill frustrates Normand. He railed against a similar proposal last year, also introduced by Hodges. He called it "over-arching bullshit Republican philosophy" that would undermine his authority to manage his personnel as an independently elected sheriff. JPSO leaves questions about immigration status to its booking agents at the parish jail, Normand said, so that he has a proper paper trail and can hold employees accountable.

Hodges' 2016 bill died in a Senate judiciary committee. Several attempts to reach Hodges this week were unsuccessful.

Normand said he will continue to work with ICE on illegal immigration cases, but he doesn't believe they should be prioritized over any other aspect of law enforcement.

"It's all examples of us in trying to excel in every bucket. That, I believe, is how you drive crime down," he said. "Illegal immigration is no different than any of those other buckets."